Tiny Plane Will Take You To The Skies

Tiny Plane™ ($0.99) by Chillingo Ltd is an arcade style, endless runner flying game that will have you doing loop-the-loops in your biplane as you try to grab all the coins and fruit without getting caught by a heat-seeking missile.

Players start off with a puttering propeller plane. It moves slow, but gets the job done. To take off, tap the lower-left corner of the screen. That sends your plane upward. Tapping the lower-right corner of the screen will send your plane downward. You’ll need to perfect these two controls in order to fuel up without crashing.

The goal is to grab as many coins as possible to unlock new planes. Players will also want to grab fruit along the way to speed up. There are shields that will help protect the plane from some damaging obstacles and special gas-freezing power ups that will keep the gas from getting used up for a few seconds.

Speaking of gas, about every 30 seconds or so, the plane will run out of gas and you’ll have to land on the strip below to refuel. This is the trickiest part of the game to master at first. I basically crashed every time I tried to refuel until I did it over and over about 10 times. Once you get the hang of it though, refueling is no problem at all.

As you go through hoops to gain speed boosts, collect coins, avoid mines and fly through the air in your little plane, the obstacles get harder and harder to avoid. There may be a row of mines with an electric storm cloud behind it that you must maneuver around. On top of that, you will start to get chased by a homing missile that you can shake off if you are particularly good with the controls, but that speeding little bomb is hard to get rid of.

This is a fun and exciting game with lots of arcade challenges. The graphics are very sweet, but it is not just a kid’s game. The obstacles come fast and often and you really have to be able to maneuver your plane well in order to avoid a collision. For only $0.99 this game is just right for fun-time flying and arcade adventure.